Henrik Sönnerlind
                                                                                                                                                    COMSOL Employee
                                                         
                            
                                                                                                                                                
                         
                                                
    
        Please login with a confirmed email address before reporting spam
     
    
 
                                                Posted:
                            
                                9 months ago                            
                            
                                4 feb 2025, 08:20 GMT-5                            
                        
                        
                                                    The best approach is to reformulate the problem, so that you use an auxiliary reference value.
Attached is a screenshot showing how this is handled for the built-in Norton creep law. Usually this law is written as

where 
 is the strain, 
 is the stress, and n is a power that is usually not an integer. This causes the coefficient A to have awkward units. (There are other problems too, for example you must know the unit in which the stress is measured.)
In order to avoid non-integer powers of units, we introduce an arbitrary reference stress, so that the equation is transformed into

Then, A will always have the unit 1/s. It will also not change its value if you change the unit system for the stress.
    -------------------
    Henrik Sönnerlind
COMSOL                                                
 
                                                
                            The best approach is to reformulate the problem, so that you use an auxiliary reference value.
Attached is a screenshot showing how this is handled for the built-in Norton creep law. Usually this law is written as
\frac {d \varepsilon}{dt} = A \sigma^n   
  
where \varepsilon is the strain, \sigma is the stress, and *n* is a power that is usually not an integer. This causes the coefficient *A* to have awkward units. (There are other problems too, for example you must know the unit in which the stress is measured.)
In order to avoid non-integer powers of units, we introduce an arbitrary reference stress, so that the equation is transformed into
\frac {d \varepsilon}{dt} = A (\frac{\sigma}{\sigma_{ref}})^n    
Then, *A* will always have the unit 1/s. It will also not change its value if you change the unit system for the stress.